I’m seeing news reports about how Trump has declared that Harvard University can no longer enroll foreign students. What legal authority is Trump claiming which gives him the power to do this?
Presumably there is some mechanism for recognising (or not) institutions as genuine for the purpose of issuing visas to their students? There certainly is in the UK.
More than 27% of Harvard students are international – this is just extraordinary tyranny and vengeance against one of the world’s most notable universities, with no justification. Harvard hosts some of the best international students from around the world. I assume Harvard will sue the government and ultimately prevail in the Supreme Court, but this is the usual Trump tactic – it takes time, and in the time it takes, the structure that they’ve illegally dismantled falls apart and can’t be put back together again.
Hopefully emergency rulings can prevent that, but I’m not hopeful that they’ll happen, or that the Trump administration will care one whit about abiding by court rulings. We are now truly in the land of the lawless.
Maybe. But I feel that if Trump is declaring that Harvard is not a legitimate college then this would also prohibit them from accepting American students. Why would a fake college (even granting the ridiculous argument) be allowed to teach American students but not foreign ones?
The Trump administration has offered its justification. The Trump administration has stated that Harvard University is affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party.
Okay, I’ve tracked it down.
There’s a program called the Student and Exchange Visitor Program, which is run by the Department of Homeland Security and which monitors foreign students studying in the United States. Part of this program is that colleges have to have SEVP certification to accept foreign students. The DHS has withdrawn Harvard’s certification and this is being cited as the legal authority for this ban.
Thanks, i was wondering about that, too.
I wonder if “right before a holiday weekend” was selected as a time that made it harder to get a court order to pause this?
And, in shocking news, Harvard is seeking a restraining order to pause the ban.
And of course that 27% includes Israelis…
Where are all those right-wing (anti)intellectuals who constantly cry about academic oppression, freedom of thought, and the unfairness of diversity on campus?
James Lindsay, JBP, Charles Murray, Steven Pinker, Eric/Bret Weinstein, Glenn Loury, and literally every racist scumbag who screamed bloody murder at the thought of applying the bare minimum of rigour to race-science or (more recently) who decried African Americans taking college spots with less competitive grades.
Some of these people made private fortunes screaming about left-wing oppression and now stand by near-silent or actively cheering an American admin who’ve made it a key pillar to target students, Universities, and academics for their speech.
Surprise, surprise. Its not like we had warning with all the book bannings, and legal attacks against health/trans education in high schools (at the state level). Let it be known. These people are fascists. They always were. Right from the start. All their arguments were lies and cover.
Is it now safe to assume that Harvard and Columbia University turned down Trump’s college applications? No one holds a grudge longer than Trump.
And it’s not just that. Getting Visas takes time. The students who were planning to attend Harvard in the fall are probably in the middle of such applications right now. Even if there’s a restraining order in place while this works its way through the courts, how many of them will withdraw their application? Why gamble on the possibility that your visa might be cancelled at any time? Why risk all the money you spend to get to Harvard, and risk ending up in an ICE detention center through no fault of your own?
I suspect 80% of those students are going to withdraw their applications, and try to go somewhere, anywhere, else.
It’s worse than that. Students are only a couple of weeks from graduating, but the withdrawal is immediate. Nobody knows what implications this has for graduation.
Harvard is, arguably, the second greatest university in all of Cambridge, Massachusetts.
It’s close enough to graduation that those students will get a degree. If they need to defend their thesis over zoom, that can be done. Most of them have already competed their graduation requirements. It’s the ones who planned to enroll next year who will decide to go elsehwere that will hurt Harvard.
Harvard will be fine. (In the larger sense). It’s the students that will bear the brunt of this.
Ha! I guess opinions vary on the extent to which Harvard’s eminence is justified. As a tech nerd, my respect goes to MIT a couple of miles away, and to Stanford and Cal Tech in California.
I suspect they will be next, 'cause we don’t want any of those nerdy science thinkers here.
Just like the Alien Enemies Act is being used to justify deportations, and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to enact tariffs, this is another blatant abuse of executive power for nefarious purposes. Any Democratic president pulling even one of these stunts would be impeached.
And they won’t likely be able to divert to Canada, either. This year Canada has cut down both on general immigration and lowered international student caps, but only because those numbers had been excessively generous relative to our population and were putting excessive stresses on our infrastructure. Beginning this year, the caps on international students are (a) reduced by 10%, (b) now apply to Masters and Doctoral students as well as undergrads, and (c) are subject to additional limits that may be imposed by individual provinces.